Maybe it’s just me, but from comments he has been making on the Journal of Nuclear Physics, I am getting the feeling that Andrea Rossi is paying more attention to the Hot Cats (high temperature E-Cats) that he is testing inside the shipping container, than to the 1 MW plant he is overseeing there.

Comments yesterday indicate that things are going very well with the Hot Cat in terms of performance. A reader asked him today, “presently ( I mean now) do you think that the small E-Cats, the ones of 10-20 kW, are competitive with the Hot Cats ?”

Sylvie Lacoste:
I noticed that you underlined “I mean now” to avoid the crystal ball ( he,he,he…). Well, I mean now I think the Hot Cats have a performance decisively superior to the low temperature small E-Cats.
Now I can see them compete, the Hot Cat inside the computer container vs the small E-Cats. We can have much longer ssm with the Hot Cats.
Warm Regards,
A.R.

Rossi has already said that the low temperature plant is capable of long self-sustain periods, partly due to a ‘clustering’ effect, where one reactor is able to provide energy to another reactor — so ‘much longer’ ssm with the Hot Cat could be very impressive.

Having self sustaining E-Cats running at very high temperature should mean that this technology is going to be very suitable for electricity production as well as heat production. From what Andrea Rossi is saying, this sounds to be the kind of technology that could make electricity generation from any kind of fossil fuel or conventional nuclear obsolete, since the fuels involved are so cheap and are consumed in tiny quantities, and there is no pollution, radiation or radioactive waste produced.

But lest we get too carried away by the prospects of this technology, we are reminded by Rossi in a comment to Hank Mills yesterday: “The data related to the COP, as well as all the publishable data, will be given after the end of the test and R&D on course. I have the duty to remember that the final results could be either positive or negative.”